Sun has created a new Emerging Markets region to drive accelerated expansion and sales coverage across growing markets in South and Eastern Europe, Latin America, India and Greater China. To accommodate the new sales region, Sun is reorganizing its leadership chain and sales organization with some appointments effective immediately, while others will start with fiscal year 2009, which begins in July.
Sun is adding an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio and expects to deliver products to the market during the second half of 2008. The Flash solid state disks (SSD) will be integrated in storage systems and servers, giving customers three times better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning disk offerings, Sun says.
Sun released the next update of the Sun xVM Ops Center at the end of May. Version 1.1 adds disconnected management, support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, enhanced update and job management functionality, ILOM2 compliance, quality improvements and bug fixes. In conjunction with this release, a new information site has been created. The Sun xVM Information Exchange provides links to the information sites for Sun xVM products.
You can now add "movie producer" to the list of Sun credits as the company is helping produce the new 3D animated film "Big Buck Bunny" by providing Network.com's Sun Grid compute utility service that offers compute infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis at $1/CPU-hr. Network.com is one of the web hosting locations for the online comedy created using open source 3D software suite Blender and developed by a community of animators under an open license.
The "Good News" from Sun for June 2008 includes Sun's storage systems being recognized in several categories for this year's Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards; three new Sun Fire servers featuring AMD's quad-core Opteron processor were introduced; Sun partnered with VMware to bring its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution to the Sun Ray system; and much more.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes: Package Manager in the OpenSolaris IPS; Oracle DSS Operations Optimized with CMT-Based Servers; Sun Integrating Flash Disks in Storage Systems, Servers; Migrating Solaris 8, 9 Systems to Solaris 10; and HoneyComb 1.1.1 Source Code Posted.
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Telecom Reliance Communications is choosing to run Greenplum Database on the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance to power a range of applications, from legal and regulatory compliance to call detail record analysis. After deploying the Sun-Greenplum solution, the time required to turn around an ad hoc request for detailed call records from the historical call detail record (CDR) database shrank from five to less than one hour, and the system reduced the average time to load a day's worth of data from two hours to under twenty minutes.
Sun, SAP and Intel have collaborated to bring customers an appliance-like solution that can help analyze their organizations' increasing amount of data to search for low-cost yet profitable opportunities by accelerating queries to cube data - the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI) on Sun.
Blade servers based on Sun's UltraSPARC T2 processor will no longer be exclusive to Sun. Themis Computer is manufacturing and selling a blade called the T2BC, which is based on the T2 chip and runs the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS). Themis is helping supplement Sun's growth in the blade server business by addressing alternative form-factors.
Ian Murdock, Sun's VP of developer and community marketing -- and, before that, founder of the Debian Linux distribution -- shared his views on the monetizing of open source software with Paul Krill in an interview for InfoWorld. There is unquestionably money to be made with open source Murdock assured Krill. It will just come from another sector of the market.
With emerging markets showing so much promise, Sun has announced it will launch a Sun Equity Partner model in Latin America during its fiscal year 2009, which begins in July. Sun's executive VP and chairman of the Americas region, Crawford Beveridge told BNamericas' Cristina Molina that the company is in the process of determining which country it will launch the business model, and is very likely to start a pilot project in the coming fiscal year.
Mark Hering, Sun VP of software infrastructure, has some comments on the 3Rs -- Reach, Risk and Return -- which, in this era of system security, is no small business issue. He cites the practices of several major companies in addressing both the need to extend accessibility and protect data integrity.
The Sun BluePrints Online paper by Michael Rosenthal and Stefan Schmitz-Homberg examines the new Sun architecture for providing software as a service. Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software delivers applications and full desktop environments to clients using a server-based computing model. The brains of the solution reside in the datacenter; Web browsers running on Sun Ray ultra-thin clients, on PCs or on mobile devices give users access to those services and applications running in the datacenter.
So you still think Linux is less expensive for Web infrastructure than the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS)? Well, Sun's Robin Goldfarb Wilensky has a few basic points she'd like you to consider.
A special Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Intelligent Storage with SAM-QFS is scheduled for June 18 in conjunction with the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'08) running June 17-20 in Dresden, Germany. Sun Distinguished Engineer Harriet Coverston, architect of Sun's Solaris distributed file system with integrated data management technologies, will be in attendance as will other SAM-QFS users, who will be sharing experiences and ideas about shared file systems and data storage.
The HPC Watercooler is hosting a video link highlighting the Texas Advanced Computing Center's launch of Ranger that took place earlier this year on the University of Texas at Austin campus. The video features comments from Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz; Jay Boisseau, director of TACC; and a host of other scientific researchers from the UT campus as well as Sun technologists, who discuss the use of this petascale computing facility.
A Sun Fire X4150 Server, equipped with two Intel E5440 quad-core CPUs running at 2.83GHz per core and featuring 6MB of L2 cache per pair of cores calls Paul Venezia's office at InfoWorld Test Center home. In addition, Venezia's X4150's features include four 10K, 72GB drives, 16GB of RAM, four gigabit Ethernet interfaces and three PCIe slots -- all in a 1U footprint. Venezia put the server to the test and reports the results.
The recently announced Sun Fire X4440 Server powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors is already making a name for itself. This four-socket, 2U chassis server earned the best score for all Opteron-based servers on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark.
Wondering how Sun's xVM VirtualBox 1.6 would stack up against the VMWare Server 2.0 Beta 2, Jason Perlow of ZDNet's Between the Lines decided to stage a face off. Read on to learn which was the last VM standing.
Some recent Sun BluePrints that may be of interest: Understanding the Sun xVM Hypervisor Architecture; Using Logical Domains and CoolThreads Technology: Improving Scalability and System Utilization; The Managed Desktop Factory: Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software as a Service; Using Solaris Cluster and Sun Cluster Geographic Edition; and Sun's Reference Architecture for Video Surveillance with ipConfigure ESM.
The next frontier for developers may well be the world of micro-embedded applications, or so a recent article from the Sun Inner Circle suggests. Micro-embedded devices include such things as medical appliances, MP3 players, smart cards, automobile braking systems and RFID tags, for example. With the arrival of the Squawk VM, the formerly difficult job of porting Java technology on this class of devices has been made considerably simpler and should open the door for developers interested in working on them.
If Param Singh, senior director of Sun's JavaFX project, has his way, Web designers will adopt the end-to-end tool being developed at Sun conceived so as to allow developers to continue work in their familiar IDEs while also integrating content from their designer counterparts. The field needs a client platform that covers the full spectrum from graphic designer to rich content creator to scripter to developer, he said, adding, "Whoever delivers that overall experience will be a platform that people will adopt. So that's our vision."
Learn how to install the GlassFish v3 TP2 Application Server software, GlassFish Update Tool and Admin Console GUI, as well as how to deploy and undeploy applications in a screencast hosted on the Glassfish Wiki.
Rajeev Angal, inventor of virtual federation and a major player in the development of the free and open-source Sun Federated Access Manager, sat down with Marina Sum for an interview on virtual federation in which he discussed the definition, the problems encountered and solved, the process and, not least, the benefits.
If you haven't heard of Fedlets, then you may want to take some time to tune in to a Sun screencast that explains just what these lightweight Service Provider implementations of SAML2 SSO protocols can do and why they will be featured in the upcoming Sun Federated Access Manager (OpenSSO) release. The Fedlets screencast covers business usage scenario, process flow and some Frequently Asked Questions.
"The Network of You" is how Sun Chief Privacy Officer Michelle Dennedy characterizes the participatory web era. Her insights on how companies can protect assets and stakeholders through thinking more expansively about data privacy and personal information management are featured in the May 2008 Sun Inner Circle.
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